Artistic Retouching
Reworking negatives, prints, or digital files by hand or software after exposure to alter their tone, texture, detail, or content.
In photography, artistic retouching refers to handwork or digital editing applied to a negative, print, or image file after exposure to idealize, refine, or reshape what the camera recorded, beyond the repair of technical defects. The word comes from the French retouche, long used in painting and engraving for corrections to a finished work. Daguerreotypists already scratched highlights into plates and tinted portraits, but negative retouching took hold with collodion on glass in the 1850s. At the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the Munich photographer Franz Hanfstaengl displayed a retouched negative with prints made before and after the work, and his pupil Antoine-Samuel Adam-Salomon soon built a celebrated Paris portrait practice on the method.
The retoucher worked at a desk whose mirror lit the negative from below. A resin medium gave the emulsion enough tooth for hard pencils, which added density to soften wrinkles, blemishes, and shadows, while an etching knife scraped emulsion away to darken areas or slim a contour. Prints were reworked with watercolor, ink, graphite, and later the airbrush. Studio retouching aimed to go unnoticed, whereas Robert Demachy and other followers of Pictorialism left brushwork legible in gum bichromate and oil prints. George Hurrell's Hollywood portraits of the 1930s depended on hours of retouching to produce smooth, sculpted faces. Since Photoshop appeared in 1990, most retouching is done in software.
Retouching has long served as a test of what counts as photographic. The 1855 exhibition rules of the Société française de photographie excluded substantially retouched prints, yet its juries admitted heavily reworked portraits. Peter Henry Emerson condemned retouching in Naturalistic Photography (1889), and Straight Photography later made the unaltered negative a principle. Some historians call the photograph "without retouching" largely a myth, since skilled work was meant to leave no trace. Artistic Retouching differs from Digital Manipulation, which can rebuild or fabricate content.